Two professors at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly), H. Jonathan Chao and Kang Xi, have been awarded a two-year, $366,700 grant to support their research of Internet routing, load balancing, and resilience design.

Huawei Technologies, a global information and communications (ICT) solutions provider, awarded the grant to Chao and Xi to help them study ways of improving the performance and resilience of the Internet backbone for the purpose of speeding up traffic.

"A backbone network has multiple paths from source to destination, so we want to distribute traffic according to link available bandwidths," said Chao in a prepared statement. Chao and Xi are researching traffic engineering to figure out how to send data on the quickest and smoothest route over the Internet.

They are also researching the resilience of routing systems. "If a link between nodes (or routers) becomes inoperative, traffic delivery will fail and have to be rerouted," said Chao. He compares Internet traffic to freeway traffic, where if one arterial route becomes blocked, simply rerouting traffic through the other route will create congestion. Rather, he said, "the systems must be designed to be responsive, reliable, and resilient."

The High-Speed Networking Lab at NYU-Poly, where Chao and Xi conduct their research, focuses its research on developing solutions in the areas of data center and cloud computing, network security, network resilience, high-speed switching and routing, chip multiprocessor (CMP) for high-performance computing, and medical implant devices for neuroengineering. The lab research is sponsored by governmental agencies such as the National Science Foundation and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well as private companies like Huawei.

Huawei Technologies employs more than 62,000 research and development staff and operates 23 research centers around the world.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at leilameyer@gmail.com.